The Whipping Boy (23 page)

A loud ringing sound caused Tom to jump. He looked up and saw the man behind the desk go to a box on the wall, pick up a thing hanging off a wire, put it against his ear, and then begin talking at it. By now Tom had run up against enough mysteries to have learned that his best bet was to sit back and wait for things to explain themselves, although it was slightly embarrassing to see this man talking into a box. The two men sitting in rocking chairs paid little or no attention to the clerk, and Tom decided that whatever the clerk was doing was not uncommon at the Main Hotel.

“St. Louis?” the clerk said into the box. “Yes. Yes. That's to Barnhill Bank and Trust. Okay. I've got it. Yes.”

The mention of St. Louis reminded Tom that he should find out if Mr. Dekker Senior was back in town yet. That was the one obvious thing that he should do before sending this telegram.

He left the newspapers folded as he'd found them and hurried to Seventh Street and walked eastward until he found the address Jake had given him, a two-story house with a broad front porch. There was a light on in one of the front rooms, coming through the glass in the front door, and he slowly approached it down a brick sidewalk. No response to his knock. The light encouraged him to walk around the house. The back porch had an icebox on it, a line of water dripping from the ice door. A dog barked somewhere in the neighborhood. When he knocked on the back door it cracked open, and he saw the light coming from the front room. The kitchen was dark. “Hello?” he said tentatively. “Mr. Dekker, are you home?” He bumped into a table and heard a clink of glass. On the table he dimly saw a plate with the remains of a meal on it. He walked toward the lighted front room, through a short hallway where something lay on the floor—a canvas hunting coat. Through a dining room with a long table, into a sitting room, where a single steady gas fixture on the wall was burning. He called, “Mr. Dekker? Hello?”

A fire had almost died down in the fireplace. The room was in disarray, with papers from a desk spilled onto the floor, a drawer left open. Two stacks of books appeared to have been taken off a shelf and dropped nearby. Tom glanced back at the smoking fireplace. The silence in the house became more ominous.

A leather album sat open on a table, and he glanced at it. On the first page was a formal daguerreotype, apparently of Mr. Dekker as a young man. He had a hawkish, emphatic, purposeful face that shone with self-sufficiency. He looked like a man who did not hesitate. “The Pelham Studio, St. Louis” was engraved on the bottom of the portrait. In another daguerreotype the same man stood with his wife and three children, all turned toward the father, as if waiting for him to decide. The oldest was a daughter and the youngest a sickly-looking boy. Ernest, the middle child, at perhaps eight, was already brooding.

Raised as neither child nor brother, Tom didn't know much about flesh-and-blood families. Books in the academy library contained edifying passages here and there regarding the duties and responsibilities of sons and daughters, which sounded disappointingly similar to the duties of orphans. He had scarcely known enough about families even to wish that he was part of one. There were families in the Bible, but in them fathers sacrificed sons, and brothers were treacherous. Jesus seemed to be mostly annoyed by families, by all their duties and rules. Now in the world, though, Tom had witnessed some of the expressions of flesh-and-blood mothers and children—the simple motions of caring—enough to yearn for this condition he knew so little about. But this photograph of a young family, turned toward the austere father, did not excite that yearning.

Tom stood in the single pool of light in the house, fascinated by the photograph album, paging through it. There was yellowed writing on the bottom of some of the photographs. On one page, halfway through the book, was scrawled

 

M. King's daught
.

Left b
.

 

The photograph was a formally posed portrait of a little girl, perhaps six years old. She was a beautiful child, with long hair and very clearly defined and arresting eyes. The coincidence of the name . . . Hair rose on the back of his neck when he realized that the eyes were shaped like hers, indeed so was the face. Did a lot of little girls look like this?

Tom heard a creaking somewhere in the house. He turned and cleared his throat and said, “Mr. Dekker, are you here?” He got a candle from the mantel, lighted it by the gas lamp, and carried it around to the entrance hall, where a staircase led to the second floor. Near the bottom step was a piece of paper, and looking up, Tom saw things strewn all along the stairs. His pulse quickened.

Again he called out and waited. Nothing. He should probably leave, because if Mr. Dekker was asleep, or if he arrived now, he might think Tom was a thief. But curiosity drew him up to the second-floor landing, where he could feel air drafting through the house. A window rattled somewhere. Two doors were closed, one open. Through the open door, he saw a dark shape sitting in an easy chair by the bed, slumped forward. Tom went slowly into the room and knelt down on one knee, passing the candle under Ralph Dekker's face. The forehead was crushed, a single messy hole at the bridge of his great flaring nose, and blood was spattered on the wall. Tom had smelled death before in the orphanage's hasty funerals.
I'm not afraid
, he told himself, looking directly into the elusive gaze of the dead eyes. One of them was floating in blood, the other was clear, and in the whole expression of the face there was terrible grief.

Tom knew how to act in crisis. He knew what to do. You stood up and you walked out the door. You held the banister and took one step at a time down the stairs. You didn't rush. You went to the back door and out, you walked at a regular pace to a different street, and you retreated through the black night.

One block at a time, you guided yourself back to the boarding house. You kept quiet, slipped in. You took off your shoes at the door and walked up to your room and lay down on the couch. You put all thoughts of telling someone what you had seen out of your mind. When you yearned for some relief, some comfort, you found it however you could—you got Jake's pillow from the other room and held it tightly to your chest.

J
AKE AND
Leonard LaFarge met Monday night at the same table in the Golden Wall. By the flushed look on Leonard's face, a significant portion of the ten dollars Jake had given him for expenses was in his stomach in liquid form. He stood up when he saw Jake, his curly grey hair winging backwards. “Come with me, my man. I tire of this mausoleum. We need a livelier locale.”

Leonard hurried through the streets with Jake following along, headed “downtown,” which in Guthrie was down a hill in the area around the tracks, called Sin Gulch, where cribs and barrel houses and sawdust dance halls occupied buildings that had managed to look worn out in less than five years. Downtown was rich with the smells of beer, ash and coal from the train track, the smell of five-cent cigars that poured out of open doors of bars, the sounds of tric-a-trac, faro, roulette. Heavy-eyed men stood listlessly in front of red curtains.

A tout at the door of a dance hall saw them coming. “Come INto the PROtest Saloon! See the GIRLS, foolish virGINias REcently IN from the COUNtry, ALL wearing transPARent GARments! SEE them here!”

“You devil,” Leonard said to the tout. “You assume that because this hair is grey I'm therefore a lecher. Well, you've got it backwards. Wait until you're four hundred years old and a candidate for the old folks' home!”

“Haven't seen you in a while, Professor LaFarge. Where you been?”

“I've been seeking an honest man, you young devil. Go back to your flimflammery.”

“FAM'ly fun, OLD-time MUSic, SQUARE dancing . . .” the caller shouted, grinning after them.

They entered a crowded room with a sawdust dance floor at one end. It had to be the busiest place in town, but they found a rough table and barrels for seats at the other end of the room from the band. The train track ran in the gap just outside, perilously close to the back wall. A woman with a raw red face appeared. “Whatcha want?” She was chewing.

“Rye whiskey will do for me, from a bottle with a label, if you have it.”

With absolutely no expression, she switched her gaze to Jake.

He ordered a beer. The odor of urine and sweat and fetid breath filled the place. It was noisy—a three-piece string band at the other end, sawing out rough hill-country music. On the dance floor a wild mix of people whirled and stomped to the harsh rasp of the strings: an awkward, toothless old man slowly flapping his arms like wings; a young, stiff, pomaded cowboy dancing a severe box step with a tiny partner; women from thirteen to fifty dressed up in small ways with a feather, scarf, or a gingham dress. These were not saloon girls but civilians. Yet at the end of the long room where Jake and Leonard sat, a row of shadowy booths lined the wall, with strange noises coming out of them. People sat in each other's laps, kissing and spooning, and occasionally a woman gave off a little yelp when the man went too far. A louder yelp caused a ornery-looking bouncer to bend down and peer into the booth with a threatening expression. The fiddle band went through “All I've Got Is Done and Gone” and “Broken-Legged Chicken,” then stopped for a break.

“Popular place,” Jake commented. The air was excited, combustible, crackling with energy.

Smiling across the table at Jake, Leonard said, “Here, my friend, you have the gayest among the butterfly chasers, frothiest of the land-rush refugees, human birds of passage on their way to the next imaginary crops. Tent camps have sprung up north of town now, have you seen them? People from Ohio, from Arkansas, Kansas, from Michigan and Minnesota. They saw the handbills put out by the Atcheson, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad, and certain other philanthropic institutions. They papered the walls of the United States with those handbills, describing the amazing, expanding, infinite Oklahoma Territory, its uninterrupted twelve-month growing season, pure coursing water on nearly every acre—I'll bet you didn't know these things, Jake—diamonds the size of nuts lying right on top of the ground, bottomland of unparalleled richness. And all of it free! Free for the asking! And so these people, who are poor, who've never made it through the debt cycle with all their legs and arms intact, never enough to catch up—quite understandably they heed the call. Strap their belongings onto the old wagon and make one more journey. Some of them have already lived in a dozen places, or fifteen, never able to sink roots, so why not! One more try.” He looked around the room and said wryly, “Clodhoppers of the world. Proletariat of the soil. They come here, spend their last dollar on beer, mix with our bootleggers, our con men, our highjackers and cowpunchers, a few light-skinned Indians who can pass the door, a few professional women—an unusual mix, ah yes, all enjoying the marv'lous mild depravity of the Protest Saloon and Dance Hall in the heart of Oklahoma Territory! Did you know, Jake, that the Congress of the United States has declared this territory to be the official trash depository of the nation, a kind of sinkhole located conveniently near the middle, into which Indians from east and west, landless peasants, outlaws, all can be swept together, thereby keeping the other parts as tidy as possible. I tell you, we are witnessing a mighty social experiment. This is the Australia of America.”

“What have you been drinking, Leonard?”

“Notice the barwomen, long of jaw and strident of voice. The grangers feel at home with them. Transparent garments, ha!”

“You oughta be a tout,” Jake declared.

“I have been a tout. A fine one. In Louisville, Kentucky. I was so successful that customers gathered round just to listen to me. I was a one-man show. The boss fired me for keeping the customers outside listening to my golden rhetoric.”

“So did you find out anything about Samantha King today?”

Leonard put on a sly look. “I did. More than I expected to. In a single telegram from my trusty colleague in St. Louis.” For a moment, Leonard looked around the room. “All right. Your Samantha King is Marguerite King's daughter out of wedlock.”

“Go on.”

“Samantha went to boarding schools in another city, where she apparently led a wild and carefree life until her mother died or was killed. Then she moved back to St. Louis.”

“What do you mean, ‘wild and carefree'?”

“Those are my informant's exact words. He either didn't know more or didn't want to say more.”

“Her mother was killed?”

“She died under suspicious circumstances. Suffocated, something like that. There was some suspicion of murder, but that's inevitable with a woman like Marguerite King.”

Jake thought about Samantha's odd blend of secretiveness and brashness, her air of having both a past and a purpose.

“Her mother'd made a boatload of money, but I don't know what condition her estate was in when she died. I'm afraid none of this will help you understand her daughter's current interests, but the long and short of it is that the young lady may be telling you the truth, Jake. She may be that rarest of archangels, the kind with
dinero
to give away.” Leonard smiled evilly.

A train was coming into town on the tracks in the gap just beneath the saloon wall, brakes squealing. Right by their table two windows went up and a group of drunken, shouting men were lining up, to Jake's surprise unbuttoning their trousers, whooping and laughing. The building shook like an earthquake when the train went by, the band scratching out “The Devil Take a Yaller Girl” and the crowd of men pushing and shoving each other for a chance to pee out one of the windows.

“There, you see!” Leonard shouted. “Piss on the mighty railroads. Oh, I am a true anarchist in my soul, but be careful how you aim those things, men! It's coming back on us!”

Jake stood up. “Let's get out of here.”